The main theme at the 2013 AFLS (Association for French Language Studies) conference held in Perpignan was mise en relief, a topic with a focus broad enough to attract considerable interest from many different angles. Not much reflection is needed to see that the issue of highlighting linguistic elements can indeed be approached from more than one theoretical direction. Apart from an introduction, the volume under review consists of a selection of papers (14 in total) presented at the conference. In addition, an afterword considers highlighting from a diachronic viewpoint. Several of the contributors to the volume are relative newcomers, reflecting the concern of AFLS to encourage researchers in the early stage of their career. There are plenty of established names, too.

The papers are grouped in sections, curiously called ‘chapters’, of which the first, ‘Les structures grammaticales de mise en relief’, has four papers that focus on constructions with ce n'est pas, deixis in the PFC corpus, pseudo-clefts with si, and subject-doubling (as in mon frère il chante), respectively. The second ‘chapter’ is concerned with ‘Autres structures aux effets focalisants’; its papers deal with impersonal constructions, implicit objects, presence/absence of an article before a noun-attribute, discursive coherence, the et ce construction, and the use of subheadings in technical texts. The third ‘chapter’, on ‘Saillance et typologie des productions?’, brings together papers on the use of gens to refer to people in journalism, the use of ouèche in French multi-ethnic housing estates, the evolution of prosody in journalistic language, and the identification of conceptual relations in specialised corpora.

Collections of conference papers are perhaps most usefully thought of as providing a glimpse of the state of the art of a topic, or in this case of its various aspects. Corresponding to this is both a greater and lesser intension devoted to each subtopic, as will be explained below. Thus the paper on subject-doubling (by Aline Auriel and Lidia Lebas-Fraczak) announces its purpose very plainly in its title, ‘Analyse de la portée de la focalisation dans le cas du redoublement du sujet’. The authors argue that the focalising effect of subject-doubling (SD) extends further than the immediate structure containing it. The issues surrounding even the quantification of SD are of dizzying complexity; as Coveney (Reference Coveney2005: 107) remarks in his variationist discussion of the matter: ‘it is well known that linguistic variation is often subject to contextual constraints, and in the case [of SD], grammatical and pragmatic factors often influence the speaker's choice of structure’. It is these constraints and factors that bedevil any attempt to quantify SD, and one result is that estimates of its frequency in everyday speech range startlingly, from 21% to 89%, depending of course on the speech community (Coveney, ibid.). It is true that the latter estimate concerns five-year-olds in Montreal (Labelle, Reference Labelle1976), but presumably young children also feel the need to use highlighting in speech. The point is that SD is constrained linguistically, no doubt principally by the tendency of clitic pronouns and verb forms to fuse in everyday French, a tendency that is of course resisted by standardisation on account of its ‘redundancy’. If this is what is going on much of the time, how exactly do we identify cases where focalisation is the aim? This may read like a criticism of Auriel and Lebas-Fraczak's paper, and one would wish to have seen the issue at least acknowledged, but the greater and yet lesser intension (greater in that much attention is devoted to one aspect of the topic, lesser in that the wider context is left aside) is rather a characteristic weakness of the genre, which compresses much into a small compass. Some conference proceedings print accounts of the discussion following each paper, but in this Internet age one hankers for electronic publication with the opportunity to add comments below the line.

Daniel McAuley's paper on the use of ouèche in the French cités illustrates the elasticity of the concept of mise en relief. The term means ‘how’ in Maghreb Arabic, and was shortened from the greeting ouèche rak ‘how are you’. From this use it has been bleached semantically and now functions as a pragmatic particle, of rather elusive definition apparently, but one of its functions is to signal in-group identity. Surprisingly perhaps, it is more frequent in the estates surrounding Paris than in those surrounding Marseilles. This particle shows therefore how highlighting in language can extend to social structure.

Owing to lack of space and expertise, only a couple of papers have been discussed in this review. Despite the rather captious reservation expressed above, the volume is a valuable first port of call for the subject. It could be useful in pedagogy, too, and should be part of the library collections of all universities where French language and linguistics are studied.